TRISTAN is a significant investment in imaging research in West Sweden. Other West Sweden collaborators in addition to Antaros include Chalmers, Västra Götalands Region, and Sahlgrenska Academy, who are all working to avoid toxicity in humans during drug development.

Imaging techniques are important components of today’s medical practices, however imaging biomarkers are not widely used in the drug discovery process. Imaging biomarkers could advance drug safety evaluation by improving translatability of pre-clinical data to healthy volunteers and patients, and thus could help avoid late stage attrition of drug development programmes. In addition, functional diagnostic imaging methods could be used to determine drug toxicity mechanisms in humans, including the potential to determine drug-drug interactions.

“We are very proud of being a partner in the TRISTAN consortium and that our MRI-models are used to find biomarkers to better predict toxicity in humans in drug development”, says Paul Hockings, Director of Imaging at Antaros, and Adjunct Professor at Chalmers University of Technology.